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 One would not, however, in any case have expected from James
Webbe’s evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. There is
Discourse. more of this root, though less scholarship and also
more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know
practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of
Robert Wilmot (the author of Tancred and Gismund) and private tutor
to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The
young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction
in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks
that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—
apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as
Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested
in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,”
“our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is,
if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on
the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the
first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent
earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always
uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a
conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.
It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol
(but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge
men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them,
Slight in he was bitten with “the new versifying.” It was rather
knowledge, his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have
taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance
of English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew
him through the references of Chaucer and others: though three
editions of the Confessio—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—
were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously
vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has,
what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of
discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in
Lydgate, though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and
odd matters.” That he thinks Piers Plowman later than Lydgate is
unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the
book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant, not to say the
Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes, and Crowley had
already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third. But he makes upon
it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that observed the
quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe
here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate
meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that
Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if
“quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, and that he
can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For
Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the
old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer,
Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday
in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named),
and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately
ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not
great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the
“ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he
specifies nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which
almost necessarily accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.
His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne,
but Sidney, and King James. After a dedication (not
enthusiastic, more than excusably laudatory) to his patron
Sulyard, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of England,”
who, if they had been inclined to be censorious, might have replied
that Master Webbe, while complimenting them, went about to show
that the objects of his compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be
wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while all other studies
are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.”
We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks
and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has
already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or
Prosodia of versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or
with necessary alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low
from their divine cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of
Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.
if uncritical, The treatise itself begins with the usual
etymological definition of poetry, as “making,” and
the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but almost immediately
digresses into praise of our late famous English poet who wrote the
Shepherd’s Calendar and a wish to see his “English Poet”
(mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is
succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English historical
sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh
laudation of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry
(especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds,
&c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several times cites
Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations
from him and other Latins. He then proceeds to a rather
unnecessarily elaborate study of the Æneid, with large citations both
from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he returns
once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of
Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the Calendar is practically his theme all
through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then,
after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a
translation of his own of the Georgics, which has got into the hands
of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-question, to
which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than once alluded.
Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced, from
Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master,
and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres,
always illustrated, where possible, from the Calendar. Still harking
back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have
been effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did
after him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek
and Latin forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly
correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a
tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with
English to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do:
Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash
enough to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s
first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful

“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”

It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag
of poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus of Horace’s
rules, gathered not merely out of the Ep. ad Pisones but elsewhere,
and an “epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will
happen when “the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,”
concludes the piece.
in On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase
appreciation. once more, we could have better spared a better
critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion invaluable to map-
makers of the early exploration of English criticism—the workings of
a mind furnished with no original genius for poetry, and not much for
literature, not very extensively or accurately erudite, but intensely
interested in matters literary, and especially in matters poetical,
generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to it,
not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in
those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad
taste, but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind
were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much for the
good of the nation—or—not at all for its good—into the acrid
disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his
modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which let him have
due honour.
Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]
—has some points of advantage, and one great one of
Puttenham’s disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. In
(?) Art of poetical faculty there is very little to choose between
English them—the abundant specimens of his own powers,
Poesie.
which the author or The Art of English Poesie gives
(and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred
to, Partheniades), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our
scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (v. infra).
On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of that engaging
enthusiasm which atones for so much in his contemporary. But this
very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need
not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe,
considered as a critic. The Art of English Poesy, which, as has been
said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which,
from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun,
before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work
of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed,
very capable in range and plan, and supported with a by no means
contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment
and common-sense. It was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was
just a little too old: that having been—as from a fairly precise
statement of his he must have been—born cir. 1530-35, he belonged
to the early and uncertain generation of Elizabethan men of letters,
the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation
of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and
Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless.
The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the Ancren Riwle would
say) into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and
Its erudition. “Of Ornament.” It begins, as usual, with
observations on the words poet and maker,
references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is fitly
written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is commendably
short. The writer lays it down, with reasons, that there may be an Art
of English as of Latin and Greek poetry; but cannot refrain from the
same sort of “writing at large” as to poets being the first
philosophers, &c., which we have so often seen.[255] Indeed we must
lay our account with the almost certain fact that all writers of this
period had seen Sidney’s Defence at least in MS. or had heard of it.
He comes closer to business with his remarks on the irreption of
rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of
leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but
even than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the question
—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what reputation
poets were with princes of old, and how they be now contemptible
(wherein Puttenham shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with
modern European literature), and then turns to the subject or matter
of poesy and the forms thereof, handling the latter at great length,
and with a fair sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to
English poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go
behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather more knowledge
than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere) far more
comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted that, engaging
as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent,
and passionate,” he does not show to advantage in the patronising
glance in passing at “that other gentleman who wrote the late
Shepherd’s Calendar,” contrasted with the description of the Queen
our Sovereign lady, “whose Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in
any kind on which it may please her Majesty to employ her pen.” But
here the allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory of later days can
never wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend, the
curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and
interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote
about Gloriana.
The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham
includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense
—staff, stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent,
cadence, situation (by which he means the arrangement of the
Systematic rhymes), and proportion in figure. On most of these
arrangement heads he speaks more or less in accordance with
his fellows (though he very noticeably abstains from extreme
commendation or condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the
moment, he seems to neglect the “new versifying.” It is, however, but
for a moment. After his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful
egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which
were to make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad),
he deals with the subject.
About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had
glanced at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and
scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young
makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, and to
the intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to
omit,”[257] he “will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length;
and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic
values than any other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does
not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion
of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse.
The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and
is evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure. It is
and exuberant called “Of Ornament,” but practically deals with the
indulgence in whole question of lexis or style, so that it is at least
Figures. common to Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect,
too, it belongs more specially to the former, in that it contains the
most elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found, up to its
time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied with the
catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein Puttenham
(sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his printer) ransacks
the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with explanations and
examples) of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded and
followed by more general remarks, of which some account must be
given.
Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general,
Puttenham proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament,
not merely may but ought to be couched in something more than a
conversational style. This added grace must be given by (1)
Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On diction he has remarks both
shrewd and interesting, strongly commending the language of the
Court and of the best citizens, not provincial speech, or that of
seaports, or of universities, or in other ways merely technical. “The
usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying
about London, within ten miles and not much above” is his norm.
There is also a noteworthy and very early reference to English
dictionaries, and a cautious section on neologisms introduced from
other tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a constant
and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual subdivision of
high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.
The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite
comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished,
Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main
principle of ornament, which he calls Decorum or “Decency,” dividing
and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery,
and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a
profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather
oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter
of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and
ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.
 We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two
champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of
“Rhyme v. 'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not
so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if
representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan
critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the
adjective great before Dryden.
The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory
matter[258] of his translation of the Orlando, which contains the gibe at
Minors: Puttenham above referred to. It is otherwise much
Harington, indebted to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington
Meres, differs in allowing more scope to allegorical
Webster,
interpretation. Then comes Francis Meres, whose
Bolton, &c.
Palladis Tamia[259] (1598) is to be eternally
mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document
about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the
critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts.
Webster’s equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the
work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface to The White Devil
(1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight of
contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it
would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir
W. Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) had earlier dealt, and
Bolton[260] in his Hypercritica (1616), and Peacham in his Complete
Gentleman (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms
adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of
Sidney, Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,”
as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.
The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is
to be found, without doubt, in the Observations in the Art of English
Poesy of Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent Defence of
Campion and Rhyme of Samuel Daniel. The former was issued in
his 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more
Observations. than twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s
letters, and more than thirty after the appearance—let alone the
writing—of Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the interval the true system of
English prosody had put itself practically beyond all real danger; but
the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to
animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for
the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even
yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and the curious
thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the
partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book
to Lord Buckhurst, the doyen (except poor old Churchyard) of
English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble exercises in
it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry but
Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as
far too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and
break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that
almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the
partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of
dactyls—that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into
an anapæst with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student
of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English
poetry, can deny. Some even of these pioneers had seen this:
Campion has the boldness to declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic
hexameter] is an attempt altogether against the nature of our
language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite bold
enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to
rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell
equally against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the
existence of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a
very large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never
seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man can
escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing to notice,
the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits, or almost limits,
our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for him—though it
still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the tribrach, the
mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into a
paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb
itself. On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of
most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third
and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the
place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed secret) in the first
place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no verse of Campion’s
that is unmusical) insists on some other foot than an iamb following
—otherwise, he says, “it would too much drink up the verse.” But, on
the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned drudge, to
make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these two,
with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs,
anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are
charming poems, notably the famous “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” and
the beautiful “Constant to None,” while Campion’s subsequent
remarks on English quantity are among the acutest on the subject.
But the whole thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of
nature.” You have only to take one of Campion’s own poems (written
mostly after the Observations) in natural rhyme, and the difference
will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that the good
rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the
bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the
despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by
its absence.
In the preface of Daniel’s answering Defence of Rhyme to all the
worthy lovers and learned professors [thereof] within His Majesty’s
dominions,[262] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the
“great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of
1603 or even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later.
Daniel and his The learned gentleman to whom it was specially
Defence of written was no less a person than William Herbert,
Rhyme. Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us
(acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up as
“Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though
of course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a
century old, and had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s
uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on rhyming as
something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of
Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his
antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor
whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have
given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a
man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put himself on
the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and
courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to
attack Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says
well, “have allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”),
and by seizing the unassailable position given by custom and nature
—“Custom that is before all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact,
not Jonson himself, and certainly none else before Jonson, has
comprehended, or at least put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts
it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd
—that the verse of a language is such as best consorts with the
nature of that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it
may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and its
consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may
search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it.
With an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about
“invention of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and
about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added
to this work of measure and harmony, far happier than any
proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a
delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is
delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think, less
happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of the
classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not
Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had
played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The
universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that
happy audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the
born exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it
sways the affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it
works upon their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.”
But it will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the
question is begged. Who made this custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at
pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it
knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot
make it otherwise. Why are we to be a mere servum pecus, only to
imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let
ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction
on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted
for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to
mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising
and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both
Classics and Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to
judgment, “go not further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of
the State of England, and see whether they were unlearned times
that could give it such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically?
Some acute and, in the other sense, rather sharp criticism of
Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic remarks for mixture
of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole
concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not
easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a
happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic
sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than
in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which
dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical
fortune of England sure.
The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have
sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon
to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently
have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a
place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to The
Bacon. Advancement of Learning. Actual, unprejudiced, and
to some extent expert, reference to the works,
however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed,
a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice
to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than
disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of
literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for
purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for
this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no
means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his
temperament, either towards great exaltation of letters, or towards
accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—
almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that
we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which
has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of
examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to
literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded
more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of
Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had
undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of
Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but
glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.
Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have
The Essays. from him very different. The Essays practically give
us nothing but the contents of that Of Studies, a
piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early
pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too
general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is,
in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but
chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with
the critical function of “study” than with all others.
The Advancement[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it
in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent
necessity that the author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain
The appearance of his actually doing so. Comparatively
Advancement early in the First Book he tackles the attention to
of Learning. style which sprang up at the Renaissance, opening
his discussion by the ingenious but slightly unhistorical attribution of
it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all antiquity, and call
former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few
names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of
Martinus v. Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to
Erasmus and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of
chronology against this singular assertion; and though the Italian
Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least in thought) care
anything for the Pope except as a source of donatives and
benefices, it is certain that most of them were as constitutionally
disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically disabled from
in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further survey are,
however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients (he
says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their
language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen
naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic
style, and the anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and
elegance and vigour on preaching and writing. All this, he adds as
Its justly, turned to excess. Men began to “hunt more
denunciation after words than matter; more after the choiceness
of mere word- of the phrase and the round and clean composition
study.
of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses,
and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures,
than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of
argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism
of Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives
more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for
gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately
rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not hastily to be
condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy
itself with sensible and plausible elocution.” But he very quickly
glides off into his usual denunciations of the schoolmen. Nor have I
found anything else in this First Book really germane to our purpose;
for one cannot cite as such the desultory observations on patronage
of literature (among other branches of learning) which fill a good part
of it.
The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very
much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening
“Address to the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we
may call it), the everlasting grumble of the scientific man, that
science is not sufficiently endowed, the further grumble at mere
book-learning, the cry for the promotion—by putting money in its
purse—of research. The Second and Third Chapters contain some
plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm imaginative way,
especially a great series of Histories, with the History of England for
their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.
But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident
or intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing
Its view of novel. The view (which, as we have seen, all the
Poetry. Elizabethan critics adopted, probably from the
Italians)—the view is that poetry is just a part of learning licensed in
imagination; a fanciful history intended to give satisfaction to the
mind of man in things where history is not; something particularly
prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible into narrative,
representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as Aristotle
would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum
dæmonum at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as
such, a refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as
distinguished from its matter, he says,[264] “Poetry is but a character
of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the
present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning,
because “being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without
a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any
other kind.” And he turns from it to philosophy, with the more than
half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”
We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-
taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be
Some obiter handled. At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the
dicta. delusive powers of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on
grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interesting observation, not
sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in modern languages it
seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of
dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a
digression to these “Colours of Good and Evil” which interested
Bacon so much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a
puff of the Basilikon Doron; in XXXII. observations on the moral
influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on
literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-quoted
eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the English
pulpit for forty years past.
If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary
Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly
be necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no
The whole of more than this to say on the subject.[265] It is most
very slight assuredly no slight to Bacon to deny him a place in
importance. a regiment where he never had the least ambition to
serve. That he was himself a great practitioner of literature, and so,
necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true;
the remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians
show that, when he took the trouble, and found the opportunity, he
could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his interests,
his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear,
literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and
dreams, but a higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He
distrusted the stability of modern languages, and feared that studies
couched in them might some day or other come to be unintelligible
and lost to the world. This famous fear explains the nature and the
limits of his interest in literature. It was a vehicle or a treasury, a
distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and qualities accorded: it
was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed, intelligible to
as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological
character and morphological definition of poetry interested him
philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature
generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more
interest than he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which
he compared to “tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more
ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the first
volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime to be half
ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while away the hours; it could
not possibly be a matter of serious as well as enthusiastic study.
Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short Anacrisis
or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern,[266] by Sir William
Stirling’s Alexander, Earl of Stirling. It has received high
Anacrisis. praise;[267] but even those who think by no means ill
of Aurora, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort
of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions
during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as
refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks
Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than
those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a
system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather
put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the
orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A
subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin
de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 129), whom he may have read.
Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil,
that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger,
even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the Æneid; finds “no
man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato
Tasso”; admits the historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject;
but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed
than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better
apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of
poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of
so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a
sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality.
But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet
another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not
of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.”
If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would
bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might
indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor,
though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated,
question of Fiction v. History in subject.
Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not
wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at
Ben Jonson: all points. His knowledge of literature was extremely
his wide, being at the same time solid and thorough.
equipment. While he had an understanding above all things
strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no
dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they
were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he
had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only
the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short
was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of
attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that
enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments
for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it
to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand
the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days,
indeed,[268] the positive performance of these was already very great.
Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to
her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush
of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and
what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know.
But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later;
he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters,
and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—
too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective.
In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks
out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics;
it interposes what may be called parabases in the most unexpected
His Prefaces, passages[269] of his plays. The Poetaster is almost
&c. as much criticism dramatised as The Frogs. But
there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in
mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or
observations, to and on the plays themselves, the Conversations
with Drummond, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet
sufficiently) known Discoveries or Timber.
To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical
passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a
History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of Sejanus, which
contains a reference to the author’s lost Observations on Horace, his
Art of Poetry (not the least of such losses) is a fair specimen of them:
the dedication of Volpone to “the most noble and most equal sisters,
Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other
passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though
somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic
scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but
rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly
excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of
assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most
unguarded form in the Conversations with Drummond.
The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too
interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss them
The in full. They tell us that Ben thought all (other)
Drummond rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written a
Conversations treatise (which, again, would we had!) both against
.
Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to
“stanzas and cross rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead
beyond them, they were all forced.” Sidney “made every one speak
as well as himself,” and so did not keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham
above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did not please him. Daniel
was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long verses,” nor Sylvester’s
and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the translations of Homer
(Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long Alexandrines” (i.e.,
fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that he “had
some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s Ariosto was the worst of all
translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping
of accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of
the world in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he
would perish.”[270] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis
(Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas
was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He
cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, “which were like
Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the same blame as Sir Philip: and
Lucan was good in parts only. “The best pieces of Ronsard were his
Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good, but smelled too
much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect,
pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he
would have been content to destroy many of his.”
These are the chief really critical items, though there are others
(putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a
curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in
prose” at Camden’s suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by
sense, without colours or accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet
at other times he denied,” says the reporter, a sentence ever to be
remembered in connection with these jottings. Remembering it, there
is nothing shocking in any of these observations, nor anything really
inconsistent. A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “reduced-to-
its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster delights.
His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in a friendly
chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or condition,
while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben did.
For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something like
system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for
the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s
critical views, we must go to the Discoveries.[271]

The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber,
Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is
explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. It never
The appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its
Discoveries. author’s death. The Discoveries are described as
being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his
daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.”
They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified (though
batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each
with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that
of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The
influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is
prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and
for some time[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on
Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing
noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a satiric
exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears
for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo
libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined
with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.
[273]
There is just but rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on
the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world.
“I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says
Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[274] Memoria
(p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business.
Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in
De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in
our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon
poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole
being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-
rhymer’s[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find
more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and
the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,”